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24-Hour Comics Day panel: Oct. 3 in Lancaster, Pa.

I’ll be participating in a panel discussion on the changing role of, and attitude towards, comics in our society to kick off the 24-Hour Comics Day event at the Pennsylvania College of Art & Design in Lancaster, Pa. It will start at noon, and end with the official start of PCAD’s own 24-Hour Comics Day festivities.

PCA&D is the only regional venue for this year’s Comics Day, and its participation is sponsored by PCA&D’s Illustration Department and PCAD’s Society of Illustrators Student Group Chapter.

Just before the main event on Saturday, PCA&D will have a panel discussion from 12 – 1:00 p.m. This event is open to the public during Art Walk weekend in Lancaster. The panel will be discussing the changing role of, and attitude towards, comics in our society. The panel will consist of guest artists Christine Larsen, Brad Guigar and Robert Pruitt, and PCA&D faculty members and industry artists Bob McLeod and Mike Hawthorne. The panel moderator will be Illustration and Digital Media Department Chairman, Bob Hochgertel.

At 1 p.m., PCA&D’s version of the 24-hour Comics Day commences. Several faculty members, alumni, and students from all departments – along with some of the guest artists, will comprise PCA&D’s participation for the fourth year. Their challenge: create full-length comics in 24 hours, from front cover to “The End.”

About our artists during the 24-hour Comics Day

• Robert Pruittis an artist living and working in Houston, TX. He makes drawings and sculptures about the complexity of black identity by combining contrasting signs and imagery of disparate Black influences and aesthetics. He layers Science Fiction, Hip Hop, comic books, and black political and social struggles into layered portraits of his friends and community.

• Brad Guigar has been creating a daily comic strip for over 15 years – “Evil Inc.” runs Monday-through-Saturday on the Web, and it also appears in front of nearly 100,000 newspaper readers every weekday. Guigar is considered by many to be a webcomics pioneer, having self-published his daily strips and other comics on the Web since February 2000. He has been nominated for the highest honor in comics — the Eisner award — for “Phables,” a year-and-a-half-long weekly series of comics about life in Philadelphia, He has published over two dozen collections of his comics, and he is the author of three books on the subject of cartooning: “The Everything Cartooning Book,” “How To Make Webcomics,” and “The Webcomics Handbook.” He operates a daily tutorial-and-advice site, Webcomics.com, and he teaches Arts Entrepreneurship and Sequential Art (Comics) at Hussian School of Art.

• Christine Larsen is originally from the Pine Barrens of central Jersey. She is a cartoonist and illustrator by trade, creating art for comics, book covers, stories, posters and websites. She has worked with clients such as Dark Horse, IDW, BOOM Studios, DC Online, Saatchi & Saatchi, Simon & Scheuster, Thrillbent and Cartoon Network.

• Bob McLeod is a comic book artist for Marvel and DC, and a children’s book author and illustrator. His picture book “Superhero ABC” was published by HarperCollins. Bob is also an adjunct faculty member in the illustration department at Pennsylvania College of Art & Design.

• Michael Hawthorne is an comic book artist for Marvel, DC and Dark horse Comics. He is the creator of the comic book series Hysteria and has provided the artwork for various other comics, including Deadpool,The Un-men, Fear Agent, Umbra, G.I. JOE: Origins, Whiskey Dickel, Three Days in Europe, one story arc of Queen & Country, and Conan: Road of Kings. He also writes and draws a webcomic titled “Raising Crazy” about his experiences raising his son. Mike is also an adjunct faculty member in the illustration department at Pennsylvania College of Art & Design.